Dear Sir or Madam: This year I took a course that has helped me realize my self as a young writer. My high school experience was one of the most traumatic periods in my life. It forced me to grow up quicker than most people my own age. Sadly, this kind of violent and tough behavior affected the quality of education that I’ve received. With inadequate resources and over populated classrooms it was tough staying on task and most of the time required me to stay afterschool. We were taught basic reading and writing skills always having an emphasis on critical reading. We were trained to learn how to read analytically and response to our readings. It was all systematic, we were forced to read and write certain ways depending on the teacher’s preference. Writing was not meant to be fun or to be used creatively it was taught in terms of a state test. After my first semester here at Ithaca College, my writing has excelled tremendously. When I first came to Ithaca College, my reading and writing score were compared to those of a junior in high school. I have come a very long way as a writer and I have a lot to thank to the faculty here at Ithaca. My progress can be compared that of the writing departments Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs).
WRTG 10600 Student Learning Outcome #1: Rhetorical Knowledge: Students analyze the social contexts that create occasions for writing and consider the needs of different audiences. My college experience has helped me release a lot of the anger I have kept bottled in throughout my entire academic career. I was able to speak out and others were there to listen. I wrote to a new audience who haven’t had the chance to hear my story. I was taught how to organize my thoughts and how to develop those thoughts in to stronger arguments. I can now analyze my social background and use my writing to target different audiences. While writing my paper on discourse communities, I realize how I was starting to adapt to my own discourse community as a politics major. I appropriately used a kind of unique style, which followed the structure of a political paper. I have studied the works of Plato, Machiavelli, Marx’s, Lenin, Trotsky and that of John Locke; these different political genres have helped me tremendously when it comes to my writing. I have learned to love reading philosophy and writing responses on social issues. My writing has been influenced by my love for social justice. I am able to adapt my tone, voice and level of formality for any specific audience.
WRTG 10600 Student Learning Outcome #2: Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: Students analyze and synthesize multiple viewpoints presented in sources and develop cogent arguments to articulate and support their own claims.
College has helped me strengthen my critical reading ability. I feel more comfortable finding different arguments and comparing them to each other while I read. A college writing assignment is a series of different task that we as writers, have to analyze and synthesize our own ideas with those of others. An example would be an argumentative paper about copyright that I wrote earlier this semester. In the paper I argue that there is no difference between Physical and intellectual property in America. While starting to write the paper I needed to do research and read the arguments made by other authors in the field. I was able to separate the strongest arguments from the